Prowlers

[richi]

Nominally mine goes down to 1000ft .... but in 320ft on a muddy bottom I can only just pick it up on the highest gain..... and once it gets deeper it looses it.

 

Basically its not getting enough signal over and above the background nosie, so either I'm loosing too much signal or introducing too much noise.

 

I have the NMEA output from my GPS feeding into it so I can use the bigger screen, better display, and extra waypoints on the FF, but that introduces noise that I can clearly see and that overcmes the bottom signal by about 160-180ft over mud. If I switch off the NMEA output from the GPS it is good to 320ft or so.

 

A combined unit avoids any of those problems but I decided to use a handhelp GPS I already had rather than pay extra for the combined unit........... probably false economy.

 

A hard bottom would help a lot but plenty of units work fine to 650Ft or more in the Sound of Mull, so it I know it should be better than it is.

 

I have all the cables coming through 1 hole, the xducer, power and NMEA, so I'm going to try making a seperate hole for the xducer cable just incase its picking up noise that way. Similarly I'm going to try re-organising below deck to make sure Xducer cable stays away from the battery box and power cables.

 

I may have got some air in when I epoxied it down...... that is always nagging at the back of my head..... and there is nothing I can do about that now.......

 

I was going to try throwing the yak down to road to dislodge the xducer but aparently even that wont work

if all of the above fail champ ask Darnsarf if he'll put you on to a bargain priced Lowrance combined unit

[codshead]

I should have been more specific on the sounders, I'm familiar with Garmins & Lowerance, cos there the makes I've had on previous craft , I do intend to fish a variety of waters, so what I'd like is the forums views on models suitable for a yak, rangeing from dedicated sounders to combi units with plotters.